Blog redesign

Regular visitors to this blog will notice that it has been redesigned. After almost six years, even a blog on Traditionalism and the Traditionalists needs a redesign.

Anarchist Traditionalism: Hakim Bey

Arthur Versluis's recent interview (see below) with the American anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson, who also writes as Hakim Bey, suggests that Lamborn Wilson’s anarchism is a leftist form of Political “Soft” Traditionalism.

Lamborn Wilson was born in 1945, and after developing an interest in Sufism in New York, dropped out of Columbia University and left the US in 1968. He settled in Tehran in 1970, and stayed there until 1978, editing the journal of Nasr’s Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, Sophia Perennis. It is unlikely that someone in this position would not have been a Maryami, and although Lamborn Wilson has never described himself as a former Maryami, everything about his biography suggests this. Lamborn Wilson certainly became Muslim, and still describes himself as a Shi’i Muslim, if only on the basis that he sees himself as still being everything that he has ever been. It seems, however, that he does not now follow mainstream Muslim practice.

Lamborn Wilson left Iran at the revolution, as did Nasr, and over the next seven years moved from the Maryamiyya to anarchism, publishing CHAOS: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism in 1985 under the pseudonym Hakim Bey, which he still uses. Quite what happened between 1978 and 1985 is unclear. Part of the explanation is evidently intellectual, and Lamborn Wilson’s later views on Traditionalism are considered below. Another part of the explanation is evidently personal, as Lamborn Wilson participated in the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBA), and his first use of the pseudonym Hakim (though not yet Hakim Bey) was in 1983, when he published Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar, a Sword and Sorcery Boy-love Tale (Amsterdam: Spartacus). Although the Maryamiyya is reported to have tolerated some sexual behavior that mainstream Islam forbids, there are no reports of the Maryamiyya considering “man-boy love” acceptable.

Although some critics of Lamborn Wilson dismiss his work as no more than an attempt to justify his own practice of “man-boy love,” in my view that work is too substantial and influential to be so dismissed.

In the Versluis interview, Lamborn Wilson makes clear that what he now values in Traditionalism is its critique of modernity, not its “proposal” for responding to modernity. As an anarchist, Lamborn Wilson gives the state–and especially the all-powerful contemporary state–a prime position in his own critique of modernity. His own proposals lead in a number of directions, none of them revolutionary in the normal sense, given his perception that the state always manages to co-opt revolutions. He stresses that his proposals should be taken in a poetic as much as a literal sense. The most famous of them is the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ),“an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it” (TAZ, quoted in Sellars 2011). A less famous proposal, more emphasized in his interview with Versluis, is a form of “even more traditional Traditionalism” reminiscent of that of Khozh-Akhmed Noukhaev: to go back even further into the past, to before the state, to the tribe, and to the form of religiosity associated with it: individual spirituality. The tribe, Lamborn Wilson, admits, is not perfect: “Violence is real, and it will always be real, and disappointment and death are always there.” But at least the tribe is not the state.

Lamborn Wilson distinguishes between religion and spirituality, between the organized and the individual. He associates organized religion with the state, as “part of the Babylonian scam.” Individual spirituality, in contrast, is associated with the tribe, and with the ever-present rebellion of the individual against the state, which produces “countertraditions or alternate traditions,” some of them spiritual, often Hermetic. Among these  alternate traditions he counts Sufism, which is anarchist in that it  understands that “this social world is illusory.” Lamborn Wilson thus prefers Henry Corbin’s vision of “the medieval manyness of Islam” to “the rigid systems of Neotraditionalism that stem from Guénon.” Guénon, then, stands with organized religion, and so does not stand against the state, and thus Lamborn Wilson stands against Guénon and, by extension, the Maryamiyya.

Although I have described the more traditional of Lamborn Wilson’s responses as separate from the more famous TAZ, the two can in fact be reconciled: the archetype of his TAZ is the  “Republic of Salé,” an autonomous Moroccan city that flourished in the seventeenth century. Salé may be seen as a small-scale human society that resembled the tribe more than the state, and the TAZ may be seen as a transitory tribe.

Lamborn Wilson, then, is Traditionalist in his probable Maryami origins, and partly Traditionalist in the terms in which he sees the modern world–including, though this is not much emphasized, a general pessimism about the direction of history, and an apocalyptic vision of a possible future of “centuries of hideous darkness.” Rather as Evola sees the spiritual as the proper root of political action, Lamborn Wilson says that his proposals ultimately have their origin in “mystical inspiration” and “direct experiential perception.” If not the proper root of political action, the spiritual is the accompaniment of anti-state resitance.

Lamborn Wilson is furthest from Guénonian Traditionalism in the anarchism in his proposals, which derive also from thinkers in whom the Guénonians have no interest, notably Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He criticizes Guénon’s own proposals to the point of dismissing them. But even so, Lamborn Wilson can probably be seen as a Soft Traditionalist.

Leftist Traditionalism is rare, if only because the left generally stresses the practical sovereignty of the whole people, while Traditionalism stresses that the people as a whole are mostly wrong. Though a leftist more than a rightist, Lamborn Wilson does not see the whole people as mostly right, however. Membership of the TAZ is self-selecting, not universal.

Lamborn Wilson links up to two further aspects of the phenomena in which this blog is interested. One is the music scene, or rather the rave scene: for some, a rave is a TAZ. Another is contemporary Western Sufism: Lamborn Wilson is enthusiastic about the possibilities of the “Green Hermeticism” project, in which connection he has good relations with Zia Inayat Khan, who helped produce Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2007, ed. Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, and Kevin Townley), for which he also wrote the introduction.

The main sources for this post are Arthur Versluis, “A Conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 139-165, from which all quotations are taken unless otherwise indicated, and Simon Sellars “Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 83-108. Most of Lamborn Wilson’s writings are available at http://hermetic.com/bey. My thanks to Jean-François Mayer for bringing the Versluis interview to my attention.

Gianluca Casseri a Traditionalist, but the explanation lies elsewhere

Gianluca Casseri, who shot three Senegalese street-vendors in Florence on December 13, killing two of them, and then killed himself to avoid capture, is being described by some press reports as “the Italian Breivik.” Both were from the radical right, both were enthusiasts of fantasy literature, and both seem to have thought themselves fighting in an apocalyptic clash of civilizations.

There are important differences between Casseri and Breivik, however. Breivik dismissed Traditionalism, while Casseri was a Traditionalist. And while Breivik’s writings make his acceptance of the clash of civilizations narrative very clear, Casseri’s writings barely refer to Islam. For Casseri, the important clash seems to have been that between Tradition and Modernity. And the important narrative may have been that of the warrior, Casseri’s interest in whom may owe something to Evola. This may help to explain his actions, but it does not explain his targets.

Something of Casseri’s ideology may be reconstructed from the four publications that can be found relatively easily: one novel, one short essay, one extended essay, and one long non-fiction book. The short essay, from 2010, argues for finding the “roots of Europe” not in Christianity or the Enlightenment but in paganism, Indo-European religion and ultimately the Vedas. It bases itself largely on Sul problema d’una Tradizione Europea (On the problem of a European Tradition, 1973) of the Evolian Traditionalist Adriano Romualdi (1940-73), and thus ultimately on Evola.

The extended essay, from 2000, “Dracula, il guerriero di Wotan” (Dracula, the warrior of Wotan), deals at length with what Casseri sees as a central figure in this tradition: the berserker, the bearskin-clad super-warrior of Norse myth. Casseri seeks to demonstrate the relationship between the Dracula myth and the berserker, with careful footnoting and references to Eliade, C. G. Jung, and Georges Dumézil, among others. Eliade and Dumézil, of course, have their own relationship to Traditionalism. The basic idea of Casseri’s “Dracula,” however, seems to come from a book by a scholar at the University of Cagliari, Marinella Lőrinczi, author of Dracula & Co. Il richiamo del Nord nei romanzi di Bram Stoker (Dracula & Co.: The call of the North in the novels of Bram Stoker, 1998).

Casseri's novel, La chiave del caos (The key of chaos, 2010, pictured) was co-written with Enrico Rulli (unidentified), and starts in Vienna at the end of the Second World War (a crucial point in Evola’s life). It then becomes a historical novel, taking the reader back to sixteenth-century Prague and the secrets of John Dee. In an introduction to this novel, Gianfranco de Turris, perhaps the most eminent follower of Evola in Italy today, wrote that the book “challenged the foundations of the society we live in” with “the mentality of the men of the sixteenth century, representatives of the perennial philosophy.”

The non-fiction book, I protocolli del savio di Alessandria (The protocols of the Learned Elder of Alessandia, 2011) refers to Umberto Eco, who was born in Alessandria (Piedmont, Italy), and challenges the version of the origins of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion given by Eco in his Il Cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery, 2010). Part of Eco’s novel places the origins of the Protocols in Eco's own picaresque occult-tinged story. Current resources do not allow me to see what Casseri’s alternative version is.

Casseri, then, appears as an Evolian Traditionalist with a taste for fiction, and also as a member of Italy’s Evolian milieu. De Turris writes introductions to his books. “Dracula” was published on the website of the Centro Studi La Runa, a mainstream Evolian group dating from 1994. The essay on the pagan roots of Europe was first published on the website of a mainstream non-Traditionalist neo-Fascist group, the  CasaPound, but the Centro Studi La Runa then republished it. Although a member of the Evolian milieu, Casseri was also read outside it: La chiave del caos was published by a small but mainstream publisher specializing in books on personal growth and related topics, and I protocolli del savio di Alessandria was also published by a non-Traditionalist publisher, though a rather smaller one.

If Casseri’s ideological profile is reasonably clear, the relationship between this and his actions is not clear. To judge from his writings, he had little interest in Islam, and neither does  the Centro Studi La Runa, or even the neo-Fascist CasaPound. Casseri wrote against the Christian myth of Europe to which Breivik subscribed. Perhaps the extended essay on the berserker, the hunter and the beast-warrior explains something?

Even though some websites and Facebook groups are now hailing Casseri as a “patriot” and casting Dracula as a hero of European resistance against Islam (on the grounds that he fought Turks), Casseri seems very different from Breivik. In Breivik’s case, the connection between ideology and action was clear. In Casseri’s case, the connection is far from clear. Casseri was clearly a committed Traditionalist, but this seems to have nothing to do with the deaths in Florence. Normally, ideology is a key to understanding terrorism, but ion this case, the explanation evidently lies somewhere else.

NOTE: Professor Lőrinczi has asked me to point out that the suggestion that Casseri used her ideas on the relationship between the Dracula myth and the berserker does not mean that she is in any way responsible for Casseri's views or actions, and Professor Lőrinczi wishes to stress that she in fact rejects such views and actions in the strongest terms.

After the Traditionalist Conference in Moscow

As previously announced, a major Traditionalist conference was arranged in Moscow by Natella Speranskaya, 15-16 October 2011. This featured the leading Russian Traditionalists, Alexander Dugin and Gaydar Jamal.

As can be seen in the photograph, among the guests were Abd al Wahid Pallavicini and his son Yahya, of the of the CO.RE.IS (Comunità Religiosa Islamica, Islamic Religious Community). Although Italian "political" Traditionalists such as Claudio Mutti (who was also in Moscow) have been interested in Dugin for some time, interest in Dugin on the part of "spiritual" Traditionalists with their origin in Schuon's Maryamiyya is new. Perhaps a sign that Dugin's influence is now so great that the spiritual and political branches may not always remain as separate as they have been in recent decades?

As well as something new, something old: the verse of Yevgeny Golovin, one of the leading figures in the Soviet-era dissident circle from which Russian Traditionalism emerged. Among the cultural events arranged in connection with the conference was a "rock ballad" using the Golovin's verse, performed by Alexander Sklyar.

Topics discussed are reported to have included eschatology, the postmodern situation, neo-Platonism, chaos, Kabbalah, and "the sacredness of authority and metaphysical horizons of the revolution."

Round-table on "Traditions and Traditionalism," Donetsk National Technical University

Another conference, or rather a round table, on "Traditions and Traditionalism," scheduled for November 11, 2011, at the Donetsk National Technical University, Ukraine. The Call follows normal academic protocol, and the round table is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Religious Studies, but is actually organized by a group called Aghlaqin that describes itself as "Thelemic"--i.e. inspired by Aleister Crowley. Conference languages are announced as Ukrainian, Russian and English, but the Call is only in Ukrainian.

There seems to be quite an interest in Tradititionalism in Ukraine. One of the websites carrying the Call is that of the Ukrainian Traditionalist Club, based in Kiev.